How Johann Hari plagiarized the Daily Mail

In 2004, Johann Hari interviewed Daily Mail journalist Ann Leslie. In his introductory paragraphs, he explained that he had affection for her, even though he regarded The Mail as 'a Mephistopholean font of evil'.

Curious, because Hari plagiarized enormous chunks of the 'interview' from an article Ann Leslie wrote for The Mail in 1997. The article was published on August 12 1997, and was headlined 'There are roses, foxhounds and schoolgirls in uniform'. Hari used 772 words of this article in his 'interview'. In the case of 227 words, he made it clear he was quoting from something Leslie had written before (although he didn't mention it had been in The Mail), which is remarkably brazen considering he plagiarized a further 545 words from the same article.

With those 545 words, he not only failed to attribute them to any article by Ann Leslie, but he also pretended she had said them directly to him. Here are all the parts of Ann Leslie's 1997 Daily Mail article and the corresponding passages from Johann Hari's 'interview'. I think these passages and the others in interviews with George Michael, Malalai Joya and many others speak for themselves: Johann Hari is a systematic and extensive plagiarist, and has been for years. 

Ann Leslie's article in The Daily Mail, 1997:  

'He was my father's bearer, valet, and a man whom I loved more than anyone else after my father. He'd been my father's bearer even before my parents' marriage; taciturn, speaking little English, illiterate, but deeply noble, with the hawk-like face of a man from the legendary North-West Frontier, he and his family - had moved with us all over India and, much later, Pakistan.

Whenever I cut my knee, I ran to Yah Mohammed. When a deadly snake, a black krait, slithered into my nursery and my ayah (Indian nanny) ran screaming from the room, her ankle bracelets chattering in panic, it was Yah Mohammed who calmly killed the krait. 

Yah Mohammed was always there if I was lonely, frightened, or leaving home again, for yet another distant boarding school. 

And it was Yah Mohammed, I later learned, who had rescued me from a friend's garden during what became known as The Great Calcutta Killing, in 1946. The city was burning as Moslems and Hindus slaughtered each other: Yah Mohammed, at great risk to himself, climbed over garden walls and hurried down alleys, carrying the little white missy baba to safety on his spindly back. He was, of course, a Moslem.'

Johann Hari's 'interview' with Ann Leslie in The Independent, 2004:

Yet it is not her father who dominates her memories of that time. It is a man called Yah Mohammed, “a man I loved with almost unbearable intensity.” He was her father’s bearer and servant, “taciturn, speaking little English, illiterate, but deeply noble, with the hawk-like face of a man from the legendary North-West Frontier.” Yah and his family moved with the Leslie family all over India and, later, Pakistan.

“Whenever I cut my knee, I ran to Yah Mohammed. When a deadly snake, a black krait, slithered into my nursery and my ayah [Indian nanny] ran screaming from the room, her ankle bracelets chattering in panic, it was Yah Mohammed who calmly killed the krait,” she explains. “Yah Mohammed was always there if I was lonely, frightened, or leaving home again, for yet another distant boarding school. And he was the one, I learned years later, who had rescued me from a friend's garden during what became known as The Great Calcutta Killing, in 1946. The city was burning as Moslems and Hindus slaughtered each other: Yah Mohammed, at great risk to himself, climbed over garden walls and hurried down alleys, carrying the little white missy baba to safety on his spindly back.” 

Ann Leslie's article in The Daily Mail, 1997: 

'Even after all these years, I still feel an almost tearful relief that Yah Mohammed was not with us on that particular killing train.'

Johann Hari's 'interview' with Ann Leslie in The Independent, 2004:

'Even now, her eyes turn watery when she explains how relieved she was that Yah Mohammed was not with her “on that train.”'

Ann Leslie's article in The Daily Mail, 1997:   

'The long Indian train clattered and screeched to a halt somewhere in the middle of nowhere. A sudden silence.

And then the screams. My mother clutched me to her, covered my eyes, told me not to be scared, there was nothing to worry about.

And there wasn't: not for us, at least.

Not for a freckled British memsahib and her missy baba, her equally freckled little daughter, sitting alone in the shabby first-class compartment of what was to become one of the 'killing trains' in the world's largest post-war holocaust.'

Johann Hari's 'interview' with Ann Leslie in The Independent, 2004:

'She draws unusually heavily on her ominpresent cigarette now. She was sitting on a train in her teens and “the long Indian train clattered and screeched to a halt somewhere in the middle of nowhere. A sudden silence. And then I heard the screams. My mother clutched me to her, covered my eyes, told me not to be scared, there was nothing to worry about. And there wasn't: not for us, at least. Not for a freckled British memsahib and her missy baba, her equally freckled little daughter, sitting alone in the shabby first-class compartment of what was to become one of the 'killing trains' in the world's largest post-war holocaust.”'

Ann Leslie's article in The Daily Mail, 1997:  

'In an orgy of sectarian bloodletting, up to a million people died and at least 14 million became refugees.'

Johann Hari's 'interview' with Ann Leslie in The Independent, 2004:

'A million people were murdered that year and 14 million people displaced.'

Ann Leslie's article in The Daily Mail, 1997: 

'Why weren't my mother and I killed that dreadful summer afternoon? Because we, the so-called 'colonial oppressors', simply didn't matter any more. We were assumed to be leaving anyway. In fact, we were always treated with extraordinary courtesy, even generosity. We did not need to be ethnically cleansed. 

So we were not the targets of the Sikh jathas - armed bands - who'd ambushed the train. Their targets were Moslems. 

Many years later, when dim memories of horror and fear surfaced in me about 'something horrible happening on a train', my mother told me how, when the train moved again, it was full of blood and bodies, men, women and children, with their throats slit. 

Further bodies lay strewn in the bloody dust alongside the track.'

Johann Hari's 'interview' with Ann Leslie in The Independent, 2004:

She and her mother survived “because we simply didn't matter any more. The British were assumed to be leaving anyway. In fact, we were always treated with extraordinary courtesy, even generosity. We did not need to be ethnically cleansed. So we were not the targets of the Sikh jathas [armed bands] who'd ambushed the train. Their targets were Moslems. Many years later, when dim memories of horror and fear surfaced in me about 'something horrible happening on a train', my mother told me how, when the train moved again, it was full of blood and bodies, men, women and children, with their throats slit. Further bodies lay strewn in the bloody dust alongside the track.”

Ann Leslie's article in The Daily Mail, 1997: 

'Yah Mohammed at his five-times-a-day prayers. Had this good and noble man been on the train that day, a kirpan dagger would have slit his throat; just another Partition statistic.'

Johann Hari's 'interview' with Ann Leslie in The Independent, 2004:

'Yah Mohammed would, of course, have been murdered as a Muslim.'  

Perhaps aware that Leslie was appearing almost too articulate in her cigarette-strewn 'quotes', Hari briefly almost abandoned the pretence, first quoting the same article but mentioning that Leslie had written the passage in question rather than having told it to him, and then going on to claim that she parroted parts of this nearly seven-year-old article back at him, 'quoting her piece almost verbatim'. That seems unlikely, putting it mildly. Especially as that particular passage isn't quoted almost verbatim - it's verbatim.

Ann Leslie's article in The Daily Mail, 1997: 

'My own Indian idyll came to an end four years after Independence because of a panther and a rabid dog. The panther had streaked out of the mossy woods where I was taking a friend's small Maltese terrier for a walk.

The terrier's lead was dragged from my hand, his little body was never found, and I suddenly felt a terrible sense of foreboding. Not about the panther. Panthers were always eating assorted Fluffs, Fidos and Freddies, the pedigree dogs so beloved by Ooty's British memsahibs, and we all had to be very stiff-upper-lipped about these tiny tragedies.

But I'd recently been bitten by a pariah dog in Charing Cross, the centre of Ooty (and had to endure three weeks of agonising anti-rabies injections.

And I knew that the hungry panther and the rabid dog meant that I would probably now be sent 'Home' - as the British in India always called England - never to live in India again, never to smell woodsmoke in the night villages, never to play with my pet mongoose, never to see the pale gold dust at twilight.

Never to sneak into the servants' compound (forbidden to the chota-sahibs, the missy-babas, the sons and daughter of the Raj) and roast cashew-nuts with them in the courtyard fires. And never to see my parents again except for once a year at most.'

Johann Hari's 'interview' with Ann Leslie in The Independent, 2004:

'But the greatest betrayal came when her mother sent her away from her beloved India altogether. “My Indian idyll came to an end four years after Independence because of a panther and a rabid dog,” she wrote years later. “The panther had streaked out of the woods where I was taking a friend's small Maltese terrier for a walk. The terrier's lead was dragged from my hand. His little body was never found, and I suddenly felt a terrible sense of foreboding. Not about the panther. Panthers were always eating assorted Fluffs, Fidos and Freddies, the pedigree dogs so beloved by British memsahibs, and we all had to be very stiff-upper-lipped about these tiny tragedies. But I'd recently been bitten by a pariah dog in Charing Cross, near my boarding school, and had to endure three weeks of agonising anti-rabies injections. And I knew that the hungry panther and the rabid dog meant that I would probably now be sent 'Home' - as the British in India always called England - never to live in India again, never to smell woodsmoke in the night villages, never to play with my pet mongoose, never to see the pale gold dust at twilight. Never to sneak into the servants' compound (forbidden to the chota-sahibs, the missy-babas, the sons and daughter of the Raj) and roast cashew-nuts with them in the courtyard fires. And never to see my parents again except for once a year at most.”

Ann Leslie's article in The Daily Mail, 1997: 

'But those schools were in India: now I was going 'Home' into exile. And my heart broke. As it broke for so many who earlier had to leave India, and who never felt truly at home anywhere else again… 

Almost a billion Indians call their land 'Mother India'. As I, in exile, also do.'

Johann Hari's 'interview' with Ann Leslie in The Independent, 2004:

'She looks at me, quoting her piece almost verbatim. “Now I was going 'Home' into exile. And my heart broke. As it broke for so many who earlier had to leave India, and who never felt truly at home anywhere else again. Almost a billion Indians call their land 'Mother India'. As I, in exile, also do.”'

I worked with Guy Walters on this. You can read his excellent analysis of it at the New Statesman. Thanks also to Matthew Turner for the initial alert about this.

Taking Johann Hari On Faith

In his recent article in The Independent, Johann Hari claimed that the accusation he was a plagiarist was ‘totally false’, and explained why:

‘When you interview a writer – especially but not only when English isn’t their first language – they will sometimes make a point that sounds clear when you hear it, but turns out to be incomprehensible or confusing on the page. In those instances, I have sometimes substituted a passage they have written or said more clearly elsewhere on the same subject for what they said to me so the reader understands their point as clearly as possible.’

He admitted that this was a mistake, and said that he wouldn’t do it again:

‘Why? Because an interview is not just an essayistic representation of what a person thinks; it is a report on an encounter between the interviewer and the interviewee. If (for example) a person doesn’t speak very good English, or is simply unclear, it may be better to quote their slightly broken or garbled English than to quote their more precise written work, and let that speak for itself. It depends on whether you prefer the intellectual accuracy of describing their ideas in their most considered words, or the reportorial accuracy of describing their ideas in the words they used on that particular afternoon. Since my interviews are long intellectual profiles, not ones where I’m trying to ferret out a scoop or exclusive, I have, in the past, prioritized the former. That was, on reflection, a mistake, because it wasn’t clear to the reader.’

So Hari has admitted that he took words from elsewhere, copy-and-pasted them directly into his articles, and did not acknowledge he had done this or attribute the sources. For anyone familiar with the basics of journalistic practice, this is the dictionary definition of plagiarism. But Hari has provided three arguments to distance himself enough from that charge to call it ‘totally false’ – and for it to have been accepted as such by other journalists – which I would summarize as follows:

1. He only did this occasionally, and only in interviews with writers. As their profession entails the use of words anyway, there’s nothing all that wrong with using their earlier words to represent their thoughts.
2. He occasionally did this with his interview subjects’ written words, which tend to be clearer and more articulate than speech. Writers can sometimes speak in a confusing way, so it makes sense to use text they have written earlier where the ideas were better expressed than their oral statements in person. This especially applies when interviewing writers whose first language is not English.
3. His interviews are not scoops or exclusives. They are, rather, ‘intellectual profiles’ primarily concerned with communicating to readers as clearly and fairly as possible a writer’s ideas and positions.

These are crucial elements in Hari’s defence, because if we take these ideas away we’re left with someone simply lifting words from elsewhere, copy-and-pasting them directly into his articles, and not acknowledging he has done this or attributing the sources – ie straightforward plagiarism.

However, not all of Johann Hari’s interviews have been with writers, they haven’t all been ‘intellectual profiles’, and some of them have, in fact, been labelled as exclusives. A case in point is his 2005 interview with the pop star George Michael. You can read the version on Hari’s site, or the version still on The Independent’s site. They’re slightly different, I suppose because the one at The Independent was sub-edited. On his own site, for example, the title is ‘George Michael – An Exclusive Interview’. The Independent titled it ‘George Michael: Talk without prejudice’. There are other small changes. On Hari’s site, the article begins:

‘Club Tropica is closed, and its shutters are rusting. In the 1980s, George Michael captured a hedonistic moment and a hedonistic decade when he sang about a Club where “drinks are free,/ Fun and sunshine – there's enough for everyone.” But today the Wham! poster boy – all silk shorts, olive skin and gleaming teeth – is dead, buried beneath his old hang-out. I am sitting with a melancholic fortysomething George Michael, and it is hard to glimpse the boy in the man. He wipes something wet from his eye and says, “This is the first time in a long time I don’t fear the future.” He is telling me a strange story about standing at the top of the world – a story where he walks on stage before a billion people and privately panics, “I am becoming one of the biggest stars in the world – and I think I might be a poof. This cannot end well.” So who killed Wham’s wonderboy? Who dug his glittering grave?’

At The Independent, it opens:

‘Club Tropicana is closed, and its shutters are rusting. In the 1980s, George Michael captured a hedonistic moment and a hedonistic decade when he sang about a club where “drinks are free,/ Fun and sunshine, there's enough for everyone.” But today the Wham! poster boy – all silk shorts, olive skin and gleaming teeth – is dead, buried beneath his old hangout.

I am sitting with a melancholic fortysomething Michael to discuss the new, authorised film documentary about him – A Different Story – and it is hard to glimpse the boy in the man. He wipes something wet from his eye and says: “This is the first time in a long time I don’t fear the future.” He is telling me a strange story about standing at the top of the world – a story where he walks on stage before a billion people and privately panics: “I am becoming one of the biggest stars in the world – and I think I might be a poof. This cannot end well.” So who killed Wham!’s wonderboy? Who dug his glittering grave?’

It looks like a sub-editor wisely split that long paragraph, and spared Hari’s blushes by spotting that the song was ‘Club Tropicana’, not ‘Club Tropica’. But note, also, the addition in The Independent version, by Hari or someone else, that he was there to interview Michael in connection with a new documentary about him, A Different Story.

It’s especially intriguing because in that documentary, George Michael says the following in relation to the period directly after the massive success of his first solo album, Faith:

‘It was like, “Oh my God, I’m a massive star, and I think I may be a poof – what am I going to do? This is not going to end well, you know?”’

This is remarkably similar to the quote Johann Hari elicited from him. Now, lots of interviewees repeat themselves and tell the same anecdotes, and it’s possible George Michael did here, right down to the same sentence structure. In A Different Story, Michael also drives around his old childhood haunts in London, pointing out a launderette where his family had lived and providing an impromptu running commentary for the benefit of the camera:

‘Mum and Dad worked in a fish and chip shop along here. My mum said it was the most disgusting period of her life, because you know how clean Mum was. She said you just couldn’t get the smell of the fish out of your hair, off your skin.’

He told Johann Hari much the same:

‘He leans forward on the virgin-white sofa in his Highgate office and teases open his childhood scars. “It’s only when the kids are in their late twenties that families really face up to what they are. You’ve gone out into the world – you've probably got a family of your own – and you’re finally in a position to look back and see if your own family was normal. I suppose enough of the damage your parents have done to you has left you by then too. It was at that age I realised how dysfunctional my childhood was.”

His mother toiled 24/7 at two kids and three jobs, and George remembers her searing, bitter hated at having to work in a chip shop because “she was obsessively clean and she could never get the smell of fish out of her hair or off her skin, no matter how hard she scrubbed.”’

As the first paragraph shows, with its detailed description of where Michael opened up about his ‘childhood scars’, there is no suggestion that Hari was paraphrasing the remarks Michael made in the film, or from anywhere else, but that Michael was telling him this face-to-face. But even bearing in mind that George Michael is likely to tell similar stories about his childhood in interviews, it’s striking just how similar the wording is here at one point:

‘...you just couldn’t get the smell of the fish out of your hair, off your skin.’

‘...she could never get the smell of fish out of her hair or off her skin...’

A Different Story also dealt with Michael’s notorious arrest in a Beverly Hills park in 1998, and showed a clip of an earlier TV interview with him about it, in which he said:

‘I’m not presuming that cruising is dysfunctional, ’cause I don't think it is as a gay man. But cruising as George Michael – there’s something vaguely dysfunctional about that!’

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hari also discussed the incident with Michael, and Michael had similar things to say. In fact, he phrased it in almost precisely the same words and sentence structure: 

‘“I don’t think there’s anything inherently dysfunctional about cottaging – but cottaging as George Michael? Yeah, there’s something pretty dysfunctional about that,” he says, laughing.’

Hari billed his interview with George Michael as an exclusive, and it wasn’t an ‘intellectual profile’ of a writer. Michael also speaks perfectly good English, and as the filmed interviews in A Different Story attest, he usually communicates his intellectual ideas in an articulate and clear manner when speaking. So this particular interview doesn’t fit the methodology Johann Hari described for his ‘intellectual profiles’, of only using the written words of writers to get across their ideas in articles not intended to be exclusives. 

Hari doesn’t appear to wish to further clarify what his techniques were for other interviews, but perhaps no further explanation is needed. Readers and fellow journalists can choose to believe that when Johann Hari interviewed George Michael, Michael really did repeat, almost verbatim, several sentences he had said in previous interviews, all of which featured in a recent documentary mentioned – but not attributed as the source of any of the quotes – by Hari. In short, we can take that Hari doesn’t plagiarise on faith. 

That said, it would still be nice to have an explanation, for the sake of accuracy – ‘intellectual’ or otherwise.

Johann Hari should admit he is a plagiarist - and so should other journalists

The debate about Johann Hari and plagiarism has descended into a discussion over whether lifting quotes from an interviewee's previous writings constitutes plagiarism. Most commentators, Mark Lawson included, have missed the fact that Hari has not only done this with quotes, but also with parts of interviews that he has passed off as his own writing, ie not put into the mouths of his interviewees. Here is just one example:

'One of my earliest memories is of clinging to my mother's legs while police ransacked our house, looking for my father.'

This is from page 1, Chapter 1 of Raising My Voice by Malalai Joya and Derrick O'Keefe, published in July 2009.

'Her earliest memory is of clinging to her mother's legs while policemen ransacked their house looking for evidence of where her father was hiding.'

And this is from Malalai Joya: The woman who will not be silenced by Johann Hari, The Independent, 28 July 2009.

I would like to see a defence of this! It is plagiarism, pure and simple. It's time to stop trying to fudge this discussion. Johann Hari is a plagiarist. It looks very much like he is a systematic one, and has been for years. Plagiarism is not forgivable simply because you agree with the plagiarist's politics, and if you have any integrity as a journalist you should condemn Hari for it, and for lying about it in his two articles on the subject. Hari has yet to admit that he has done this, and it is time he does.